Trying to Compete with MS SQL but no luck

[chrisnov2004]

Hello,

We are using MySQL for several large databases and getting relatively good performance.

We have a new DB in MS SQL that we are trying to setup in MySQL for performance. The data is stored in long strings like this:

'0010011100101101'

Basically, each 1 or 0 represents a YES/NO for specific data. There are 21 tables with anywhere from 200char to 572char strings. This can be done in MS SQL using a CHAR field, indexing it and using substring selects. We can complete most queries in 2mins on MS SQL.

MySQL only allows 255chars for char/varchar. I've tried the TEXT type but it does not appear to work at all for this application.

The tables look like this on MS SQL:

FIELD1 UNIQUE_ID BIGINT
FIELD2 STRING_VALUE CHAR()
**both fields indexed separately.

Can I do this on MySQL or are we just going to have to stick with MS SQL on this one?

thx